First they came for the home-schooled….

by Kit

There is a war being waged. Not the one in Syria or Yemen. Not the Nazis shelling the Donbass or the warlords selling slaves in Libya. Not America’s drones executing an entire garden party in Pakistan because somebody on that street might have googled “bomb components” and “American Airlines” on the same day 10 years ago. Not even between the ridiculous buffoon Trump, and the equally absurd “resistance”.

A different kind of war.

Perhaps “struggle” would be a better word.

The struggle is eternal in every direction – it has always been, it will always be. It goes to each horizon and both poles and everywhere in between. In every mind and body. A global conflict with a million fronts in a thousand theatres.

People versus power: A struggle between the population and the power to control it, personified through institutions and governments.

People don’t want to be controlled, they naturally resist it.

Institutions know only control, they crave it.

Power is addictive like that, and institutions are true addicts. Give them a little power and they’ll want a little more. Give them a lot, and they want it all. Power tends to corrupt, as the saying goes, but the inverse is also true: the corrupt tend towards power. They are more likely to want it, more likely to be willing to do anything to get it, and more likely to abuse it once they have it.

That’s the point of democracy of course, to keep the soil tilled. To turn over the manure and hope something green can grow. To fight against corruption by giving it no time to ferment. To stop the rot setting in. It doesn’t really work, but it works better than anything else.

Somehow The Guardian has found its way to the vanguard of this war. It’s picked its side in the great conflict, and it wasn’t ours. Every day, in every way, The Guardian shows its support for them over us. Every campaign, every agenda, is about empowering the state and destroying the individual. They want to hand the government the power to control what we eat, what we say, who we say it to, where we go, how we get there. Even what we think.

It is a struggle for control of life on Earth, not on the grand scale, but the specific. Every small decision, every tiny moment, every thought and word and action will need government approval. Global hegemony won’t come via Imperial wars of conquest, but a conglomeration of tiny restrictions of individual freedom. If they don’t want to ban things, they want to regulate them. If they can’t regulate them, they want to tax them. Which is to say, ban it…for poor people.

In every issue, on every issue, The Guardian is the spokesperson of the authoritarian heart of the state – pleading for more power in the name of the safety of the masses or the grand virtue of the collective.

The editorial is anonymous – why The Guardian does this, I do not know. It could be that they are trying to put across a collective identity, it could be that some thoughts are so shameful and absurd that even Guardian journalists won’t cop to them, or it could be they receive written memos from GCHQ or government press offices and simply copy and paste them into their website. It could be some odd combination of all three.

Whatever the explanation, there’s no name on it…so we don’t know who wrote it. We just know they have an agenda and aren’t ashamed to stretch logic to breaking point in order to service it. The agenda is simple – regulate homeschooling into oblivion, ban it if we have to, regulate it if we can. Homeschooling is a problem in desperate need of a solution:

Children educated by their parents must not be hidden from the authorities.”

…shrieks the sub-head. Without ever providing any evidence that a) Home-schooled children ARE hidden from authorities or b) That, if true, this is a bad thing.

It’s all notionally about Jordan Burling, a young man who allegedly lived a terribly sad life of abuse and neglect, and then died at the age of 18. He was also home-schooled.

Let’s be clear about this: Child abuse and neglect happen, they are an unfortunate fact of life for a tiny minority of children. There is no reason to imply a connection with home-schooling and force a causation where only correlation exists.

All of Jack the Ripper’s victims wore shoes. Ergo we need to regulate shoes in order to protect people from serial killers.

The author (whoever they were) is, however, intent on ignoring a basic fact of life – that a factor can be present without being causative – in order to pursue their chosen agenda:

…there is no reason for the government to wait before acting on behalf of other home-schooled children, of whom there are thought to be around 50,000 in the UK – a number that has increased sharply in recent years.

There is nothing to suggest home-schooled children are at risk. In fact, there is no evidence that being home-schooled leads to an increased risk of abuse or neglect. How do I know this? Because the article says so, in the next sentence:

There is no evidence that being home-schooled leads to an increased risk of abuse or neglect.

Literally, the very next sentence. Look…

So, as it turns out, not only IS there a reason to “wait before acting on behalf of other home-schooled children”, the article actually provides it to us. A more spectacular own goal you will not see this side of England’s next World Cup campaign.

The author, to their “credit” (for want of a better word), doesn’t seem to be totally unself-aware, feeling the need to claw back some of their “credibility” (for want of a better word), by adding some more facts to their “article” (for want of a better word):

The government believes most home educators do a good job. But reviews following the death from scurvy of eight-year-old Dylan Seabridge in Wales in 2011, and of Khyra Ishaq, who was starved to death aged seven in Birmingham in 2008, highlighted home-schooling as a factor. Concerns around safeguarding, and what happens when children disappear from the view of professionals who might otherwise support them, are one reason why the government is seeking to tighten and clarify the rules surrounding home education.

That’s it. The weight of the case against home-schooling is three deaths over 10 years. The prosecution rests.

Let’s now put a counter case:

IF home-schooling is the recipient of one The Guardians favorite “crackdowns”, what will the results be?

In the best scenario: nothing. Because…

There is no evidence that being home-schooled leads to an increased risk of abuse or neglect.

But let’s make a wild leap of speculation, and assume that the Tory government which sends men and women dying of cancer back to work, and refuses benefits to thousands of sick and disabled people, may not act either ethically or competently. Maybe, just maybe, they will simply create a bureaucratic nightmare of a system that sees more children taken away from their families, possibly thousands more, on spurious and absurd grounds. These children will then be thrown into the system of foster homes and adoption…a system which definitely DOES lead to an “increased risk of abuse or neglect”.

“The Guardian view” is that the state should be more active in protecting children. But our state sells weapons to Saudi Arabia to drop on school buses, and wants to take away free school meals from underprivileged children. Our state doesn’t a give a toss about children – foreign or domestic – and demonstrates this to us every single day.

It doesn’t take much imagination to progress further down this road to hell – paved, as always, with “good intentions”: We already know the government spies on us, they pass laws making it legal, so it’s all fine. But handing the government the power to control home-schooling, coupled with monitoring internet and phone communication, could easily lead to a massive political bias in the way the new home school laws are enforced: Leftwingers, trades unionists, “conspiracy theorists”, all being refused the right to home-school their children based on their tweets, their voting history or their Amazon wishlist.

It’s really not that hard to imagine.

Ask yourself: Why is The Guardian – allegedly a liberal paper in favour of being nice, recycling, tweedy cardigans with leather elbow patches, slippers, refugees and the Antiques Roadshow – in favour of handing the uncaring, even malign state, more power and authority?

The only logical answer is they want to create a more authoritarian state. A cross between Stalinist Russia and Mr Roger’s Neighborhood, where everyone has been successfully Mrs Lovejoyed into obeying Big Brother because he really does know best. A jolly, comforting oligarchy with twinkly grandfather eyes and half-moon spectacles. A nice, friendly dystopia with burning incense and herbal tea and drifty floral print dresses. Where everyone gets a turn and everyone is special and everyone does what they’re told…or else.

A new kind of “progressive” statism. Where our caring authoritarian masters aren’t controlling or dictatorial because they want to be, but because they need to be, for our sake. A kindly overlord child-proofing the world for the betterment of their naive charges.

Homeschooling is increasing, on both sides of the Atlantic, this is unsurprising given the above facts, the decline in the quality of education, the drop in schools funding and a generally unacademic attitude of control, censorship and indoctrination that has taken hold of a lot of Western institutions in recent years.

That same attitude will push, harder and harder, to clamp down on homeschooling – if not to outright ban it, then set a “home school” syllabus. The syllabus will be either impossible to implement, meaning parents can’t homeschool, or so incredibly controlled that it eradicates the benefits of homeschooling in the first place.

The campaign has already started state-side, where certain law-makers leapt upon the convenient Perris case to try push anti-home school legislature through the state, with the assistance of the media of course. Fortunately, it was defeated.

As I said, it is a war with multiple fronts. A war to take ownership of the individual and control of the sovereignty of the self, and it is won by the people when we talk to each other and rely on ourselves. That’s why they want to get a hold on home-schoolers, and why they’ll continue to push at social media to ferret out dissent.

You can see the pattern with vaccination – how, in America, political debate on vaccination was dismissed as a products “Russian bots” trying to “sow division”. Once the law to ban homeschools is put forward, anybody criticising it on Facebook will be a Russian bot.

First they came for the homeschooled, and I did not speak out…because they banned my Twitter.

I wonder how many home schooled children are diagnosed with ADHD? Not many I suspect. If you break that piece of high falutin’ psychobabble jargon down to its constituent parts: attention deficit – bored; hyperactive – energetic; disorder – I would suggest the disorder lay with the adults that created the situation which caused the previous two. Like a school for example. But when you consider that two and a half million (two and a half million!) children in the US are prescribed Ritalin what kind of blackguard would want to deprive big pharma of such a lucrative revenue stream?

‘Some children are bullied mercilessly at State Schools, so mercilessly that they commit suicide’.

I would undoubtedly have killed myself aged 18 if I had not gone abroad and experienced kindness, superior teaching and a world free of bullying, sneering, taunting etc etc.

The primary school I attended was a progressive leftie sort of place, the grammar school rather lower-middle class Tory. Neither interfered in the processes of working class boys beating me up.

I might have done it earlier if I had not gone private aged 13, to a school where the bullying was merely verbal.

Both those homes of bullying were regulated, funded by the State. Both had schools inspections, both had Governors from the Borough Council. None had any back channels for bullied children.

Perhaps I should abolish state education because I was bullied as a child?

Tell parents to home school their children or else??

I think the brainwashing that masquerades as education is what should be regulated. Make schools prove they do not brainwash children before issuing them with a new license. Make them apply for a new one every ten years.

Make the school prove they are not some hotbed of marxist multiculti poof-promoting political nonsense. Make them prove they are not a racist hotbed of nazi-saluting, muslim-torturing, Jew-hating, black-enslaving pile of right wing shite.

Oh and make them prove they do not harbour MI5/6 recruiters, they are not a fifth column of secret society plotters, the senior leadership are not OCD surveillance freaks tracking every keystroke typed on campus.

In short, make them prove that every 16 year old boy knows the practical meaning of sexual consent; every 18 year old boy and girl can manage a food budget, can cook healthily and well, is physically fit and takes regular exercise, has a sound knowledge of nutrition, the major common ailments and illnesses that humans endure and has a reasonably clear picture of the nature of their sexual drives.

If school does not create children who are fit, healthy, sexually aware and confident, then it damn well should be regulated out of existence, eh?!

The only home-schooled people I read of were Bertrand Russel and Virginia Woolf — both of them noted for independent views compared to the Main Stream Media of their day. Bertrand received also religious instruction from his aunt: “Thou shalt not follow a multitide to do evil.” (One of my favourite Biblical qu,tations). No wonder The Authoritarian Opinion is against home schooling. Well spotted, Kit!

Of course, the experience can also breed resentment. “Virginia and Vanessa Stephen were educated at home by tutors while their brothers and half-brothers went off to the best schools in England. The family had an expansive library and even the home schooling the girls received was better than the education available to most children in England. However, Virginia Woolf never forgot that if she had been born a boy, she would have …”. Everyone knows children who love school.

Contrarywise, I am reading the autobiography of a man who hated school because he didn’t want to “get an education and get on” — all he wanted was to stay on the farm and be a shepherd in the place where he was born.

@BigB. Or “discovered” Wittgenstein by keeping him on at Cambridge; the way GH Hardy claimed his greatest contribution to pure math was that he “discovered” Ramanujan by inviting him to Oxford. But I think Wittgenstein developed into a more interesting philosopher after he had shaken off Russell’s Logical Atomism. His little book on Word Games was a revelation to me: we learn the meaning of a word by joining a game in which that word is used; and it seemed to me, that game is The Game of Life.

My son did not attend school when he was six years old. Where I live a child must attend school between six and sixteen UNLESS… There are several exceptions after the word “unless”. One is unless the child is receiving satisfactory instruction at home or elsewhere.
When my son was six I informed the local school board that my son would not be attending school. The school board sent me a letter to sign requesting permission from the school board for my wife and I to home school our son. I laughed at the letter and sent them back a letter that I composed. In it I simply said that our son would not be attending school because he was receiving satisfactory instruction at home or elsewhere.
The school board asked for a plan of what they called “home schooling”. I sent back a one page letter stating that my plan was to essentially have no plan. The school board thanked us for our plan in writing and asked if we would speak to a school board superintendent about the plan. I went for a meeting with the superintendent and on meeting him and shaking hands I said that he would probably want to ask me why we were not sending our son to school. I told him the reason our son was not going to school because we wanted him to get a good education and you can’t get one by going to school. After that statement I asked him what else he would like to ask me.
I was aware that the school board policy for deciding if the child was receiving satisfactory instruction was to compare the child with the norm for his or her age. If the child fell below the norm then the child was not at fault, it was the fault of the instructor. This, of course, would require the child to attend school. I was so hoping to be challenged on the matter as my first response would have been to ask if any children attending school fall below the norm for a child of his or her age. Clearly any child in this situation would have received unsatisfactory instruction from his or her school teacher or teachers.
By the way, my son was not “home schooled”. The way I put it he was in a home learning program where he was always in charge of his education. My position is that for significant learning to take place the desire to learn on the part of the student must precede the desire to teach on the part of the teacher.

Manumit….dont be silly – state school mind rape is good for you… .
anyway, to homeschool, need to head for the wilderness, bring the kids up in a cave, minimal footprint,can feed from natures harvest, the children can aquire woodworking skills, carve totems, learn to hunt and kill – but most important, they do naughty things with the local animal population, because i’m certain that’d be considered acceptable… it’d be seen as empowering, liberated etc – and just think, later on, would assuredly assist them to a job in politics.

the post was a designed to mock the hypocrisy and sleaze that we’re expected to so obligingly ingest – so am interested, if the down thumbers didn’t notice that, missed the Irony of it ?….which I thought was reasonably obvious.

“The editorial is anonymous…” That’s standard. Editorials are always unsigned. For which reason I don’t read them. I don’t give a crap about their rules. And it’s not only editorials in major media. Many articles and reports in alt media (which doesn’t automatically mean progressive media) are anonymous. So many in fact, that I am forced to overlook my rule about ignoring unsigned articles. Otherwise, I would shutting a lot of info, which, in the case of alt media, is often clearly good. (RT News, which I don’t consider to be alt/progressive, but is anti West establishment, is a big offender in this regard. So is teleSUR.) I HATE being presented with unsigned articles. Sign your work!!! No excuses.

This is somewhat off topic but I feel compared to draw attention to the massacre of the 40 Yemeni children by the Saudi air force, equipped, trained and refuelled by the US/UK. Of course Yemeni children, like Palestinian children, ‘don’t count’ in the geopolitical calculus of mass murder of the innocents. Herewith the usual squirming response of the US proxies after this latest outrage:

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have admitted that the bombing of a school bus in Yemen last month – which killed 51 people, including 40 children – was “unjustified”.

Translation:

Oh dear we got caught out, let’s give the official perfunctory apology. You know the sort of thing: ‘big mistake, fog of war, et cetera, you know the playbook justifications, along with the usual bullshit. ‘We’ are a civilized people – only chopping of peoples’ heads if they deserve it – but rest assured this ‘mistake’ will not happen again ….blah, blah blah. BTW have we checked the latest US ordnance deliveries before we resume operations. Let things calm down a bit until we can start bombing kids again.

Abject doesn’t begin to describe it.

I have tried to get the youtube of the British playwright, Harold Pinter, in his last valediction who dissects the Anglo-Zionist project as a type of conditioned insanity. Unfortunately I was unable to obtain the youtube in question. I wonder if it is possible to obtain Harrold’s parting shot at the insanity and infamy of our age.

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I’ll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out
over Castille’s dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings —
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

— by Pablo Neruda

Quote Ends.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

Perhaps it’s you that’s confused if you expect OffGuardian to be a proponent of authoritarian statism, like the Guardian. Here, you’ll find supporters of conspiracy theory, 9/11, anti-vaccination, no regime change disguised as ‘humanitarian intervention’, and critical thinking before we swallow anything the media dishes out 🙂

A new kind of “progressive” statism. Where our caring authoritarian masters aren’t controlling or dictatorial because they want to be, but because they need to be, for our sake. A kindly overlord child-proofing the world for the betterment of their naive charges.

Home schooling is a locus of possible resistance. By enabling a more direct and sustained contact between the generations, beyond the three Rs and other academic specialties, lessons learned by the previous generation in social, political and economic terms are more likely to be transmitted to those ensuing.

The capitalist establishment has long been well aware of this fact.

As deteriorating social and economic circumstances incite greater restlessness and dissent among the majority of the adult population, the danger of an intragenerational radicalization increases.

To attenuate that possibility, compulsory schooling becomes a weapon deployed against the general population, precisely in the spirit of the residential schools of old, whose avowed purpose was to “kill the Indian in the child,” under the guise, of course, of applying the principle of equality of opportunity in childhood education, the content of curricula and funding to be “beneficiently” controlled by the ruling class.

The tactic works.

The bonds between parents and children are irrevocably perturbed if not completely broken, on account of children being segregated by age, so that they can only effectively learn to ‘relate’ to their generation or age group in the years of their greatest impressionability, and the breakdown in communication between the generations of the working class is put down to a “stage” in the child’s development, namely, those years of “teenage rebellion,” all quite normal and to be expected, see.

In reality, however, what is happening is that through the effective physical segregation or separation of the generations as enforced by compulsory “grade” school, by minimizing contact between all so-called age groups, intragenerational socialization is preempted or weakened, in this way deepening the fragmentation or atomization of the working class, as also partially results from an enforced over-regimentation from above of the adult’s workday and, of course, the children’s schooldays.

That’s the second time I’ve seen the idea of “spacing out the generations” this year.

A New Scientist (very good mag, if you ignore the zionism in every issue) story about space travel to the nearest star (about 6,500 years one-way) said:

“The pair chose a ship capable of carrying at most 500 people, meaning strict social engineering would be necessary to enforce a population cap. Women would be allowed no more than two children each and be limited to procreating between the ages of 35 and 40, to space out the generations.”

And I wondered why? Why space out the generations? I think Norman is exactly right about the atomisation of the people, but I still don’t see how it would help a space colony.

Believe it or not, some societies in Africa do grade their people (or their male members actually) into age classes. Each class consists of the sons of the men of a higher class. The class performs duties appropriate to its age-based cohort level, and enjoy certain rights and privileges associated with that level, and as its members mature, they go into the next class where they train for and accept new responsibilities and enjoy new rights and privileges.

The classic example of a people who use age classes is the Oromo who use the Gadaa system. From birth, every male member moves from one class to another every eight years. In each class, they learn how to be members of their communities, learn herding (in Class 2) and how to defend their people (Class 3), and later learn governance and are permitted to marry (Class 4).

The Gadaa system or something similar could work for a colony of 500 people if they all agree to it. Women could be allowed to join it or create their own age grade system that parallels the men’s system and dovetails with it.

I homeschool my two children in the UK. The potential for resistance is very high. Because I am at home a lot I have time to grow my own food, bake my own bread, repair things, buy from small local businesses etc. During meetups with other homeschool families, we actually have time to discuss things you often can’t discuss in a workplace.

You will inevitably end up supporting your child to learn a lot more than they would at school, in part because you have time to finish things. I sometimes suspect this too is seen as a bad thing by TPTB.

I homeschooled our twins. Since I worked evenings and nights, I was available to them all day, every day, with my wife being at home in the evenings (she being, of all things, a school teacher 😉 ).

Each year, we gave them the choice of attending school or staying at home to do their academic learning and so much more. It wasn’t until high school that they decided they wanted to attend a formal setting. They did quite well, academically speaking, and both have only recently graduated from university.

Both are very aware of the kind of society in which they live, more so, I think, than they would have been if they had been in school from the very start.

They still live at home, despite being on the cusp of their mid-twenties. They work the local grocery store while trying to land employment more befitting of their credentials and interests. Hopefully their plans will pan out for them.

We have always been a tight-knit family, and so we remain, each very supportive of the others, very much emotionally attuned, one to all.

Are they by mainstream standards radical? You can bet your bottom dollar . . .

Glad we did the homeschooling.

My children, who are all grown up now (well, they will always be my ‘kids,’ I suppose), if as yet financially dependent, are very decent human beings and emotionally very robust, and realistic in their expectations . . .

As a parent, what more could you ask for? We’ve been lucky — at least so far . . .

Glad to hear that others are doing the same for their children! All the best to you and yours!

I would add that access to grandparents is especially dangerous, especially if they are able to bring to life and discussion earlier days and crimes such as WW1, the Depression, the Influenza epidemic, McCarthy and much more.

The Guardian cultural war is as you say in their pages every day. But personally I think unregulated home schooling isn’t necessarily a good idea. It’s not so much abuse and neglect as religious extremism that is the problem. Religion should be left at the classroom door as they used to say. It is divisive and socially damaging. For the same reason Faith Schools are a terrible idea. Private education should be priced out of existence. Our comprehensive schools need all of those kids.

I homeschooled because my son was being treated like crap for ‘not having a diagnosis that indicates he needs extra help’. He was five and being sent to the princepals office (or forced to sit in a chair and not participate) for having a meltdown once or twice a day (usually close to the end of the day) because he didn’t want to stop certain activities he enjoyed. His teacher called him names in front of his friends, him and me, because she felt that a five year old shouldn’t ever have an emotional crisis. He didn’t hit. He didn’t yell. He would just lay on the floor and sob. But that was too much for her and the school wouldn’t put him into another class.

Because I ‘didnt get him diagnosed’. With what? Being tired? Having fun? Being five?

I took him to the doctor and she was very reluctant to do anything because it seemed normal to her. But we tested him anyways. He is bright, a little OCD, a little hyperactive, but otherwise very normal.

But it sure as heck wasn’t a religious thing for me. It was more a matter of making sure he was still learning while we found out what was ‘wrong’.

The teacher so far, seems to be what was wrong.

He is going to a new school this year. Goodness knows he deserves better than a another year with his mom.

All differences (language, religion, ethnicity) might be ‘divisive’, and they can be made ‘socially damaging’. The task of a successful schooling system is to make sure people can respect each other over such differences. Telling them at the door that something is bad and should be left out acts contrary to this aim.

Many secularists want to believe that religion is the source of conflict, even though no historical evidence backs this up, and the history of modern West, secular ideologies, and anti-religion regimes have shown given the last death strike to this myth of secularism. This myth exists because some people have merely decided that secularism is somehow neutral and objective approach without the faults of religions — on the basis that it is how they have chose to believe.

So, no — religion should not be excluded from schools, neither philosophy, art, or intellectual and cultural history. Human culture, including religion, is the telos of humankind. Excluding any part of that would be a step towards seeing humans as a production machine the rich can exploit.

If someone’s counter-argument to this is a mere opinion that ‘religion is bullshit’, they are not educated enough on this topic.

Good point. Many people still naïvely think that getting rid of religion is going to somehow change human nature, with all of its narrow-mindedness, clannishness and wishful thinking. But history has shown over and over that replacing church-worship with state-worship serves no good end.

I’d prefer freedom of worship and a strict separation of religion and state. The state having no business meddling in affairs of religions except where religious rituals and administrations harm or exploit people (especially vulnerable people like children, abused women and the elderly) physically, mentally and financially; and religious organisations having no business meddling in politics or seeking to influence and lobby politicians and political parties, and creating political parties to represent their interests and ideologies.

Religious organisations should not be exempt from paying taxes, especially property and land taxes. Owning property historically is where they gained their power and by which they still acquire power, money and influence. They can have a place in running scripture classes in secular schools but I do not believe they should be allowed to run or finance schools.

Equally I do not like to see politicians courting favour with religious organisations or their leaders, and appealing to them for money and electoral support.

So, no — religion should not be excluded from schools, neither philosophy, art, or intellectual and cultural history. Human culture, including religion, is the telos of humankind. Excluding any part of that would be a step towards seeing humans as a production machine the rich can exploit.

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